In the field of medical procedure simulation there exists a need for improved devices and methods which will authorize better realistical portray of an actual surgical procedure.
This is due to the fact that performance of endoscopic procedure requires skill to avoid complications that may cause important injury to a patient.
In case of angioplasty-balloon procedure for instance, the surgeon should direct a guide wire, a catheter and a sheath through arteries to a blockage point and inflate a balloon to withdraw the blockage.
This has to be done while avoiding numerous complications, such as hurting an artery and creating hemoragy.
Therefore these practionners imperatively need to develop expertise in order to ensure successful operations.
Training on live patients is efficient but need a skilled physician to supervise and avoid serious injuries to the patient.
It also needs the use of hospital facilities and equipment, and of course live patients to allow sufficient experience to perform these types of procedure.
That is why simulation has occurred in this field with expertise originally coming from simulating procedures used in other fields such as aeronautics or vehicle driving.
The prior art which has attempted to overcome the above described disadvantages of live patients to train physicians is basically disclosing (see for instance U.S. Pat. No. 4,907,973) expert simulator system for modeling realistic internal environment having a mock tool such as an endoscope inserted and manipulated within a model. The model has a mock bodily region to be monitored and a plurality of sensors to detect the position of the tool (an endoscope) within the body.
A computer is used for representing the views observed from the measured endoscope position during a real operation.
Such systems present disadvantages.
The use of physical models restricts training to particular bodily regions, obliges simplification as a model cannot contain the same complex anatomy than a real body, and also is not providing feedback on the applied force.
In order to be more realistic it has then been developed (see for instance U.S. Pat. No. 5,821,920) a medical procedure simulation system that utilizes virtual reality technology. Such system includes a display device and programmable tactile/force reflecting mechanisms that provide force feedback to generate the feeling of medical instrument and the interaction of the instruments with a simulated anatomy.
But such systems of the prior art are also suffering of some disadvantages concerning both the way the feedback is provided to the physician coming from the difficulty of grasping correctly elongated object such as an endoscope, thereby degrading the accuracy of object motion measurements, and the difficulty of realistically simulating such instrument during a medical procedure with all the different positions and orientations which can be provided in real life, as well as with several instruments provided simultaneously.